A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with competence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of largely uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
